When traveling, I often want to experience the lifestyle of people. Because I had limited vacation time and wanted to see the country as much as I could, staying with a host family during the entire trip was not an option. However, I was able to find a small opportunity to experience one Costa Rican family’s life by visiting their coffee plantation for a few hours. Costa Rica is known for their coffee. I should add that traveling during low season brought in some great perks as I got my own personal tour and was able to go at my own pace!

A lovely woman who was raised by an American mom and a Costa Rican dad walked me through the plantation along with the very friendly owner of the plantation. I’m not going to go into the details of the process of making coffee because I think I’ll bore you, and you can always google info about it. So, I am just going to touch upon a few very special highlights of the tour.

Seeing what coffee beans actually looks like before they reach the stores was a “WOW!” moment. It looked like a bright red grape. It gave me a greater realization that we can’t just pick the commodity straight out of the ground and send it straight to the stores. There is a long process to get the real good hot coffee in a cup. It involves picking the beans, drying them, roasting them, pouring them into a bag, shipping them, and then grounding the beans to turn into the great liquid we drink. Nowadays, when I get coffee, I think about all the people involved in the process. There has to be hundreds of people along the way. On top of all, I have a better understanding of how the price of coffee is determined.

I sure did get to try a few samples of coffee. What amazed me is that a change of process of producing coffee can change the flavor. For instance, coffee that were roasted after being dried out tastes different from from coffee that were roasted without having been dried.